Sunday 31 August 2014

These pieces were created from a simple impulse. I wanted to write some short, self-contained pieces (I’ve done this before, but it’s been a while). The apparently modest scope of this project allowed me to realise another idea which had been in my head for some time: of composing a piece of music entirely within a spreadsheet.

Microsoft Excel has been my most frequently used compositional tool. I’ve used it to generate tuning systems, scales of tempos and durations, distribution and density of different events. This spreadsheet work has then always had to be applied to some other, music-making medium. I wondered if it would be possible to create something entirely in Excel, which could then be read as MIDI instructions for a computer-controlled instrument.

Of course, someone has already thought of this and written a little program called midicsv, which translates MIDI files to humanly intelligible lists of numbers and vice versa. So, nothing could stop me!

As I described in my post about generative systems, each organ piece is 12 measures long (each measure a different tempo), using 12 organ stops, each stop playing 12 notes. 144 notes in each piece. Each measure begins with a note on different organ stop, all other notes can appear at any time in the piece. Moving from one pitch to the next is done by a crude approximation of flocking behaviour (i.e. each note is more likely to stay close in pitch, and less likely to imitate any “outliers”). Within these parameters, all outcomes are determined by chance.

As threatened, I wrote 144 of these little pieces. With some tweaking of the spreadsheet formulas, I was able to make the last 72 in half an hour: enter the piece’s number and the data generates automatically, ready to be copied, pasted and converted to MIDI. I’ve uploaded them all to Soundcloud, so you can pick and choose or click at random. Each piece is 25 to 55 seconds long so they shouldn’t try your patience.

Each piece follows the same set of simple rules. Making and listening to these pieces has raised a number of more general issues about music for me, which I intend to discuss in a later post.

Tuesday 19 August 2014

The first paragraph is a bad-tempered rant which may be ignored.

This album came in the nick of time. I’d been listening to a bunch of “new music” lately that left me disillusioned about what so many composers are up to today. They want to get away from all that stuffy, arty concert hall music, but they don’t seem to know how. This would be more palatable if they addressed their predicament honestly but instead they plough on with fixed smiles and serious sincerity, serving up boring, boring music while telling us the scene’s never been in better shape. They repeat the mistakes of the post-minimalist set from the 1980s and sound old before their time. Bland harmonies, four-square rhythms, aspiring to the lofty heights of pop music but ending up like library music, an internationalised corporate-speak that speaks to, and is spoken by, no-one.

It was such a relief to join the crowd in that hot, stuffy, noisy room at Cafe Oto to hear Apartment House play at the launch of their double-CD of Laurence Crane’s music. The uncomfortable conditions were made simultaneously worse, then better, by the sheer number of well-wishers crammed into the place and the celebratory mood they brought with them. The bigger relief came from prolonged exposure to Crane’s solo and chamber pieces.

Mostly short (5 to 10 minutes), seemingly simple and unambitious, each piece has sort-of clear harmonies, almost-regular rhythms, kind of like the habits of those post-minimalists – only completely different. The spareness of the music suggests an ambiguity of things omitted, its transparency allows nuances to emerge in a way that implies greater depths concealed beneath the surface and hints at how they may be revealed. The material may be conventionally seductive, but its presentation is disaffectedly formal. You suspect there’s a formula behind it, but also suspect that learning the formula would neither help nor hinder your enjoyment. Like Satie’s music, it is obstinately beguiling. Like Satie’s music, you could mistake it for aural wallpaper only to discover it is in fact furniture and unexpectedly bark your shins on it.

Listening right now, there seems to be a timeless quality to Crane’s music, inasmuch as its qualities seem to serve no manifesto nor oppose a prevailing fashion. You could play the CD to your non “new music” friends and not think less of it after it turned out they liked it. Like the best pop music, its bright surface can also suggest darker or more sinister moods.

At the launch I bought the CD so I could enjoy it at greater length. It’s put out by Another Timbre, whose discs I have written about before. Apartment House’s playing is appropriately clean, clear and possibly even deadpan. I’m playing it whenever I can to remind myself that there’s more than one way of doing things, that it’s always possible to make things new.

Wednesday 13 August 2014

What went wrong: analogue component needs development, now that I have the two feedback systems interacting in a meaningful way. Too much shrill, high-pitched stuff kept appearing too often. I can now trust the system to work without any necessary intervention; now I need the means to break the system at will, again. Didn’t take enough photos. Need to do more gigs.

I may post an excerpt from the concert recording when I’m less self-critical about it.